What is Melrose (formerly known as Shibuya)? It is a service provided by Adobe that helps you monetize your AIR applications. Pretty cool, isn’t it? Still, what exactly does it do for you? In a nutshell it helps you push your AIR application to millions of people and it handles all the details related to charging money for the application and setting up trial periods. From a code perspective, you add a library and couple of lines of code to your application to enable all these features.

For now, there are two storefronts available for you: Adobe AIR Marketplace and Intel AppUp center. You can use Melrose in 47 countries for now (it is still in private beta): Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Colombia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, People’s Republic of China, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Singapore, Slovenia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Turkey, Ukraine, United Kingdom and United States.

If you choose to charge money for your application, then you get 70% of the revenue (there is a minimum price of $2.99 for any app you want to sell). You get the money on a monthly basis, provided you sold for more than $100 in the past 30 days. There are no charges if you choose to give away your application for free.

And finally, you have access to a dashboard where you can see information like number of trials, number of purchases, and revenue.

You can sign up for Melrose here, on Adobe Labs. Sign up and let us know what do you think!

I thought it would be cool to talk about this app because chances are that you haven’t heard about Enterprise Cafe. So what is Enterprise Cafe? It is an AIR application (:D) that aggregates a big number of resources on the following topics: LiveCycle, Acrobat, Connect, ColdFusion, Flash Platform.

Once you log in using your Adobe ID account and choose, for example, the Flash Platform, you’ll see a screen like this:

Enterprise Cafe helps you to stay in touch with the community (you can access Adobe forums from this app), receive news (you’ll find the success stories posted here very interesting), check out the latest blog posts and videos using the incorporated RSS reader and Adobe TV section, or check for Adobe events.

If you want to convince your team or boss about the value of the Flash Platform, then you should definitely take a look at this app. You’ll find the information you need to convince them.

Install Enterprise Cafe

You can download the application from here.

Here is the second episode of the Flash Builder’s Lost Features show. This time I chose to talk about Flash Builder’s profiler and give you enough info to feel comfortable using it if it’s new to you. Profiler helps you to locate memory leaks, identify excessive object allocation, or analyze execution times.

With the extension of the Flash Platform on mobile devices, I think that it’s more important than ever to build Flash applications that run efficiently for a long time. Here is the video (you can watch the video in a higher resolution here).

If you want to read more about the “art” of profiling then please take the time to read the official (here and here) and Ilan Avigdor’s article.

On August 16th – 17th I’ll be in Barcelona, Spain.

This summer you have many contests to pick from if you want to create Flash content for mobile (Android 2.2) and win something while doing it. You can win fame/money/software/mobile devices — not neccesary in that order and not all at once– but you get the point .

For more details, check out these contests:

• Kongregate Mobile Flash Game Contest (almost $30,000 in prizes)
• Mochimedia Made for Mobile Contest ($20,000 in cash plus CS5 Master Suite licenses)
• Cell Your Flash Game ($30,000 in prizes)
• Adobe Czech Republic AIR Mobile Contest 2010 (Nexus One phones and software)

Good luck!

Lately, I’ve been thinking and working a lot with multiple-screen applications that run across desktop and Android devices. The reason for doing this is pretty simple: my first four computers were less powerful than the current smartphone I’m using these days.

And still I was doing far more things then I do with my phone now. So what are we using the smartphone for? I think we use a smartphone mainly for: making phone calls, Internet browsing, mailing, GPS, listening to music, and playing games. But is this all we can do? I think not.

One of my dreams is to be able to use my phone for tasks that I accomplished using the same tools 5-10 years ago. Let me give you some examples: we all have at home a number of remote controls: for the TV sets, DVD player, sound system, Air Conditioner system, TV set-top-box and the list could go on and on. The basic interaction between us and these devices hasn’t changed lately. Maybe you could replace some of these remote controls with an expensive one, touch based. This is only a compromise. We should be able to use our smartphones for these kinds of tasks and much more.

I mean we all carry the phones all day; they have beautiful screens and you can interact with them using the touchscreen interface. The biggest issue that prevents us from doing this is that most of the systems we are using today don’t talk the same language, nor do they offer a common API to interconnect them.

Hopefully this is starting to change. With the extension of the Flash Platform on smartphones (for now only on Android phones, but soon it will be available on other phones too) and on the TV sets/set-top-boxes we are one step closer to achieving a unified system. So instead of relying on manufacturers to expose a common API, we can leverage a common runtime that runs across devices. Imagine that you’d be able to use your smartphone for:

• Checking the current temperature in your home (even when you are not at home) and starting/stopping/reprogramming the AC
• Being able to change TV channels from your phone
• Being able to check the schedule and make a recording right from your phone
• Start recording a program on your way back home because you’ll be late and don’t want to miss the NBA final
• Controlling your music system from any room or even from your lawn
• Checking the grocery list your wife wrote two days ago while shopping

Some of these are already possible using some expensive home automation systems. Others are possible using a cloud solution. I think the ubiquity of the Flash Platform on a larger number of different devices and the huge number of Flash developers will make many of these available in the near future for everyone who cares and decides wisely what devices to buy.Why? Because on one hand it will be cheaper to develop a solution for multiple devices due to one common runtime and one language/framework to learn and, on the other hand, the Flash community is full of people who are not afraid to dream and who love to push the limits (just have a look at projects like Nexus One Wireless Slot Car Gas Pedal, Audiotool, Screenergy, or Creaza.com if you don’t believe me).

Until then, I will keep dreaming and try to build some of these myself. I’m looking forward to Google TV and the first TV sets that “speak” Flash.

What do you think?

LATER UPDATE: I’ve just seen this cool Android app build with AIR and Flex 4 that controls Freebox STB: http://chubby75.com/blog/?p=9

This week I had time to play with another idea for Android/Desktop applications: a picture viewer. My friend Alex Chiculita from the AIR team gave me this idea. A couple of weeks ago he played with a multi-screen application that let you load a picture from a device and send the picture to all the other devices connected to the same Wi-Fi network (the app runs on Android, Windows, MacOS, and Linux).

While playing with his application I realized that I could transform it into something more helpful (at least for me). Here is the challenge: we all use our smartphones for a lot of things, including taking pictures. Having a decent digital camera (this is what a smartphone became lately on top of a mobile phone) with you all the time means you can take interesting pictures. And usually you want to show these pictures to your friends or family. However, here is the problem: while taking pictures is extremely easy, sharing them involves cables,  Bluetooth, or seeing the picture on the phone’s screen.

My solution to this problem is AndroidPictures (the above pictures show AndroidPictures in action on my mobile). This Android application lets you browse through the pictures taken with the phone and scale/rotate/pan them. On the desktop, you use the companion AIR application for AndroidPictures, which displays the pictures sent by the Android application. All you have to do to see the pictures with your family is:

• connect your Android phone to the WI-FI network;
• start the AndroidPictures app on your Android phone, and start the PicturesViewer app on one of/all your computers;
• what you see on your mobile phone will be replicated on all connected computers.

Watch the video below to see how it works.

The making of

I used Adobe AIR and Flex 4.1 for creating the Android and desktop applications. In order to connect the Android application to the desktop apps I used Peer-to-Peer direct routing (the same approach used in my previous app). As I already explained, if your local subnet (for example your home Wi-Fi) supports broadcasting then you can create a NetConnection without using Stratus or a Flash Media Server (you connect the NetConnection to “rtmfp:”). This is one of the new features available in Flash Player 10.1 and Adobe AIR 2.

Once you have the clients connected, you can send messages from any one to all of them. And the cool thing about using this approach as opposed to Socket servers is that you don’t have to manually manage all the clients. Your program sends a message and the clients decide how to handle the message. You simply don’t care how many clients are connected. You can read more on my fellow evangelist Tom’s blog.

Because I wanted to use this approach for other apps, I created a simple library (you can get the library’s source code from here; unzip the archive and import the PeerToPeer.fxpl project in Flash Builder). You’ll find three ActionScript classes, and the magic happens inside of MultiCastingService class. The public interface of this service is:

• isReady
• neighborCount
• userName
• connect()
• disconnect()
• post()

The service throws these events:

• ServiceEvent.CONNECTED
• ServiceEvent.DISCONNECTED
• ServiceEvent.PEER_CONNECT
• ServiceEvent.PEER_DISCONNECT
• ServiceEvent.RESULT

The simplest way to use this service would be:

    var service:MultiCastingService = new MultiCastingService();
    service.addEventListener(ServiceEvent.RESULT, onResult);
    service.addEventListener(ServiceEvent.CONNECTED, onStatusChange);
    service.addEventListener(ServiceEvent.PEER_CONNECT, onStatusChange);

    service.connect();

    private function onResult(e:ServiceEvent):void {
        if (e.what == "picture") {
            //do something with the bytes: e.body
        }
    }

    private function onStatusChange(e:ServiceEvent):void {
        if (e.type == ServiceEvent.PEER_CONNECT) {
            if (service.neighborCount > 0) {
                //others are connected; send a String message
                service.post("this is my message");
            }
        }
    }

For the Android app I had to tweak the Spark List in order to make it works with both touch and click events. For the picture interaction I used a library created by Tim Kukulski, a member of the Adobe XD team. This library makes it easy to interact with pictures by letting you use gestures like zoom, pan, or rotate.

The desktop application waits and responds to two kinds of messages: picture bytes and pictures transformations (rotation, zooming, or panning). Every time a picture is selected in the Android app, I grab its bytes and send them through the “wire”. When I transform a picture in the Android app, I grab the Matrix and send it to all the connected clients. The client applies the Matrix on the picture. And the rest is history

All in all it was pretty easy to put together these apps and I had a lot of fun while doing this. If I have the time, I will try to see if I can play the movies recorded with my Android by extending the current code.

Getting the apps and source-code

You can download the source code from here, install the desktop application from here, and the Android application from here. If you want to run the Android application, you need to install Adobe AIR on your Android (more info here).

If you have ideas for more applications that take advantage of having AIR running on Android phones and desktops please let me know. If you create something interesting, I’d love to hear about. I already have another cool idea, this time more complex and even more fun!

Have fun with the Flash Platform on multiple screens!

Today, I finished a project I’ve been working since last week: a desktop MP3 Music Player that can be controlled by any number of Android phones. I built these apps using Adobe AIR and the Flex framework. Below you can watch a video with these apps in action, running on Motorola Droid, Nexus One, and my laptop (you can watch here the video in a higher resolution).

The communication between the remote controls (AIR apps running on Android phones) and  desktop player is done using the peer to peer features of AIR 2 and Flash Player 10.1. Basically if all the parties are connected to the same subnet and if the network allows broadcasting, then you can create a group and send messages to all the members without the need of Stratus or some other service/server.

Actually, while working on this project I created a small class that enables you to quickly create clients who connect to a local network. Of course, this is only one way of connecting two or more clients. You can use sockets if you want, or one-to-one communication (peer2peer). But I think in both these cases you have to work more, because you have to manually manage all the parties involved. If you want to find out more about peer2peer features of the Flash Platform take a look at this MAX session and read my fellow evangelist Tom Krcha’s blog.

The Android app was more fun to build because I used the touch input mode along with click input. I enjoyed a lot tweaking James Ward’s code for scrolling a Flex List. Believe it or not, again I used Illustrator and Flash Catalyst a lot to create the skins or parts of them.

Until I have the time to put together an article explaining  how these apps were created, please enjoy the video and play with the apps: desktop file and APK file. And from here you can download an archive with the source code. If you need the Adobe AIR runtime or AIR SDK for Android, please sign in for the pre-release group here.

What do you think?

Yesterday we announced Hero. This is the code-name for the next version of the Flex SDK. I think you’ll find the main themes for this release very interesting:

• Multi-Screen Development: Allow developers to build applications that target the web, desktop or mobile devices using a single unified framework.
• Spark Maturation: Polish and grow the Spark architecture by adding new Spark components and capabilities.
• Large-Application Development: Support developers building large applications by improving fundamental Flex infrastructure pieces.

Among the big news is that both mobile and desktop needs will be served by the same core Flex framework (Hero). Previously, we said that Slider (the code name for the Flex Mobile Framework we announced at Max 2009) would be a separate framework from the Flex SDK. I think this is excellent news; having one framework to target both worlds (mobile and desktop) means that you, the developer, have to spent less time learning and coding.

You can read more about these themes here.

For now there are no public builds for Hero. We are working on this and pretty soon we will have public builds. Keep an eye on this site for Hero white papers and builds.

If you haven’t seen these two projects, then please keep reading. I’m sure even if you are familiar with all kinds of cool rich Internet apps these two apps will surprise you. And to tell you the truth, I was surprised too. It seems that every now and then some cool projects pop up and they manage to move what is possible with the Flash Platform to a whole new level.

Enough talking, let’s start with the first project. Screenergy.com is a multi-touch 46″ full HD table with object tracking capabilities. Well, these specs are cool but not something to amaze you. Yet! They used this cool hardware as the platform to run AIR applications that allow people of any age and background to interact visually with a system that handles and displays loads of data. Basically, the system can recognize a specialized card you place on the table and display the information related to that card. You can move the card on the screen, and you can expand and change settings. Here are some pictures to help you better grasp the amazing interactivity that Screenergy provides:

This project was built for the Global Climate conference in Copenhagen (2009). And the visitors and VIPs were able to visualize the impact that different changes have on the climate. Here you can get a taste of the application and here is a video with the table in action:

I knew about this project from the beginning because the people who built it approached me back in October 2009. They told me “we want to build an application for a touch table using AIR for the UI, and the client is one of the organizations behind the Copenhagen’s Climate Change conference. We have about a month to do it! “. Then we talked about AIR 2 features (at that time it was in private beta) and how they could leverage AIR 2 features for their project. And then, before Christmas, I received an email from them telling me that the project was delivered on time and it was a success.

The second project, Creaza.com, is delivered as a web application using Flash Player. It is a suite of four programs: a mind-mapping tool, a movie editor, a sound editor, and an online comic tool for creating cartoons/digital stories. Funny,  I know the guys behind this project too I had the pleasure to meet them back in 2007 during a user interview around Flex Builder 2 at that time.

For me the most amazing product from this suite is MovieEditor. It is one thing to play video in the browser and a totally different thing to be able to create a movie inside the browser using a web application that is pretty close to desktop video editors in terms of features and performance. You can use this timeline-based video editor to create movies  complete with professional-looking titles, transitions, effects, animation, music, and narration. You can test this app here.

I think these two projects are not at all two lonely rain drops lost in an ocean. I strongly believe that this is the natural result of the maturity and power the Flash Platform has achieved. The Flash Platform truly makes easy things easy, and hard things possible. There are more than 3 million Flash developers according to Evans Data, and many of these developer started with the Platform in the past two years. There are tons of libraries, frameworks, and tools to pick from (both commercial and open-source). There are many companies and agencies with a lot of experience in building rich Internet applications.

In a nutshell, I’m seeing an ecosystem that is growing and innovating faster than ever. Thus, I’m sure that many more cool projects will cross my path and I’d be happy to talk about them. And remember, these two projects are not just a proof of concept; these are fully functional projects that make money. The companies who built them are not huge corporations – quite the contrary. But what they may lack in terms of money they make up in imagination and a belief that everything is possible!

What do you think?

Last week I had the pleasure to present to the first edition of gotoAndSki() conference, up north in Norway. During one of my sessions people said that it’d be a great thing if Adobe could present the Flash Builder new features in such a way that it makes easier to learn them. They suggested instead of just throwing big PDFs to the community, we could also have blog posts tackling one feature at a time. I think this makes sense; we are all too busy with current and upcoming projects to find the time to go through manuals.

So here I come and I start today a series of articles called Flash Builder’s Lost Features. Today I’ll present Call Hierarchy command. This command makes it easy to find all the places where a particular property/variable/function/method is used in your project. It works for ActionScript or Flex projects.

To use this feature, right-click the variable or method you are interested in and select Open Call Hierarchy.

When you do this, you should see in Flash Builder a new view (named Call Hierarchy) with all the occurrences of what you’ve selected. If you double-click an entry, Flash Builder will open the file where that entry can be found and you can inspect the code. Also, you can extend a node to see the call stack trace. And all of this can be done without having to run the project.

This is it for now. Like I said, it is a small and simple to use feature, but it is pretty powerful. In the next episode I will talk about Flash Builder’s Profiler.

I know it has been way too hot lately, especially here in Bucharest. I have good news. First, next week the weather is expected to be cooler.  And second, I plan to host a Flash Coffee Meetup in Bucharest! The event will take place next Tuesday (June 22nd) at Grand Cafe Galleron (near La Mama restaurant, P-ta Romana) starting at 5PM.

There are only 15 tickets so hurry up and use this link to register. I’ll pay for the coffee and bring an Android phone with Flash Player 10.1 and Adobe AIR installed on it. Thus we can enjoy a good cup of coffee on a cold day (something that we’ll pretty soon miss ) and talk about the latest Flash Platform and mobile device news.

You can register here. See you next Tuesday.

The Adobe MAX Awards 2010 competition is open (the deadline for project submission is August 13th – hope you are not superstitious ). This year’s categories are:

• Advertising and Branding
• Digital Publishing
• Enterprise/Government RIAs
• Entertainment
• Multiscreen
• Social Computing

Good luck!

This August (25th – 26th) if you live in India and you work in the IT field then you really should consider attending Adobe Flash Platform Summit 2010 in Bangalore, India.

This is a two day event, and more than 2000 people are expected with tens of sessions and international speakers. You can read more here and you can register here (you can save 60% if you register before June 25th). If you want to propose a session then hurry up because the window is closing on June 21st.

It seems this summer that webinars are highly fashionable. The App in a Week European webinar hasn’t finished yet, and we’ve announced another one: Going Multi-Screen with the Flash Platform. The webinars will take place between June 22nd – 24th and you can register here.

I guess after attending these webinars you should be ready to create multi-screen applications when Flash Player 10.1 and Adobe AIR will be available for the Android platform (now they are still in beta).

This is the complete schedule:

• Tuesday, June 22, 9AM – 10AM Pacific Time – Best practices in optimizing web content for Flash Player 10.1
• Tuesday, June 22, 1PM – 2PM Pacific Time – The quickest way to build cross-platform apps with AIR 2
• Wednesday, June 23, 9AM – 10AM Pacific Time – Rich Internet App development with Flash Builder 4 for Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2
• Thursday, June 24 9AM – 10AM Pacific Time – Multi-screen web content development with Flash Pro CS5

Enjoy!

As I promised at the end of my webinar here I come with the projects I used:

• The starting project created using Flash Catalyst
• The finished project (Flex and PHP project)
• PSD file

You can use the Import > Flash Builder > Flex project wizard to import these two projects into Flash Builder. However, to make the second project work, you need to copy the PHP files from inside the project (you’ll find a folder named eva_services with a bunch of files) to the root of your PHP server. Next you have to create the database (there is an SQL dump inside the same folder) and change the connection credentials from eva_credentials/db.php to match your local settings). Actually you can read more about this in my article on Debugging Flex and PHP projects.

I know that I squeezed quite a lot in my webinar and I had to move quickly between the topics. But you don’t have to worry because you’ll find articles and screencasts below that go into great detail on all the topics I covered:

• Setting up XDebug and debugging Flex and PHP projects here
• Working with Doctrine, Zend Framework, and Flex here
• Working with Flash Builder’s DCD features on PHP projects here
• You’ll find many Flex and PHP articles and videos on the Flex and PHP section of Adobe Developer Connection site,
• If you want to read more about remoting and AMF using Zend Framework or AMFPHP here are two articles I wrote awhile ago: Zend Framework and AMFPHP
• Data Paging using DCD features here

Finally, the recordings for the webinars:

• Erase the Designer to Developer gap: Adding interactions to your design (Serge Jespers’s session)
• Connecting a Flex app to PHP services (my session)
• Connecting a web application to a J2EE backend using Flash Builder 4 (Michael Chaize’s session)
• Working with Flash CS5 components in your Flash Builder 4 project (Mike Jones’s session)
• Going multi-user with P2P in Flash Player 10.1 (Tom Krcha’s session)
• Developing multi-user applications with LiveCycle services (Tom Krcha’s session)
• Bringing web Applications to the desktop with AIR 2 (Piotr Walczyscyn’s session)
• Code once and run on multiple mobile devices (Mark Doherty’s session)
• Rapidly build, deploy, and maintain Internet apps with ColdFusion (Terry Ryan’s session)

Again, I want to thank all of you who took the time to attend my session. Until the next time, Ciao!

I realized that for us (Europeans) it is a little bit harder to get our hands on a Nexus One or Droid phone. So, if you have created an AIR app for Android and you don’t have a device to test it on we can meet at one of the next events I’m doing and I will let you do the testing. Maybe we can shoot a video too

For now, my schedule looks like this:

• June 2nd I’ll be in Cluj-Napoca Romania  attending a Flex Camp
• June 3rd – 5th Timisoara Romania, attending and speaking at Drupal Camp
• June 10th-12th Norway attending gotoAndSki()

If you live in Bucharest, just send me an email and we will figure out a date depending on when I’m not travelling.

Looking forward to seeing what you build

The first release of OSMF, 1.0 is out. This is great news for both developers and publishers. Using the components from OSMF you can build quickly high quality and fully featured video players. And if you think about this, it totally make sense. I mean if you are a publisher your main expertise is to create/distribute/monetize the content and not to create advanced video players. And if you are a developer then you get an excellent start using components that were already tested and supports the latest advancements from the Flash Platform (Flash Player 10.1, Flash Access 2.0, HTTP Dynamic Streaming).

OSMF gives you the blocks you need to build a modern and powerful video player. What if you just want an out of the box player? Well, you have to take a look at Strobe Media Playback then. This is a compiled SWF that gives you a video player created using the OSMF.

I just want to add one more thing: OSMF was developed by many parties, not only by Adobe. Others submitted plug-ins and code. I know my friends from Kaltura are one of them, but other big names like ESPN, Akamai, Brightcove.

You can find more here.

The entire European platform evangelism team worked hard to create great content for a webinar called App in a Week (June 7th-10th). What is it all about? In short: We will show you how you can create applications using various
techniques with the help of the Flash Platform. Basically you will see different tools at work (Flash Professional, Flash Catalyst, Flash Builder, Photoshop), different approaches (Flex, ActionScript, desktop, mobile or web apps) and different back-end technologies (PHP or Java).

Long answer: it’s really too long, so better sign up and join us. I’m sure you’ll find new things. Here is the complete schedule:

• June 7th – 12:00 – 13:00 GMT Erase the Designer to Developer gap: Adding interactions to your design with Serge Jespers
• June 7th – 15:00 – 16:00 GMT Connecting your design to PHP services with Mihai Corlan
• June 8th – 12:00 – 13:00 GMT Connecting a web application to a J2EE backend using Flash Builder 4 with Michael Chaize
• June 8th – 15:00 – 16:00 GMT Working with Flash CS5 components in your Flash Builder 4 project with Mike Jones
• June 9th – 12:00 – 13:00 GMT Going multi-user with P2P in Flash Player 10.1 with Tom Krcha
• June 9th – 15:00 – 16:00 GMT Developing multi-user applications with LiveCycle services with Tom Krcha
• June 10th – 12:00 – 13:00 GMT Bringing web Applications to the desktop with AIR 2.0 with Piotr Walczyscyn
• June 10th – 15:00 – 16:00 GMT Code once and run on multiple mobile devices with Mark Doherty

As you can see we set up the event to work well for Europeans You can register here!

If you watch the news or what’s happening at Google I/O 2010 chances are that Google TV is not a novelty anymore. However you may not know that Google TV uses Flash Player 10.1 (Google’s browser, Chrome, integrates Flash Player). This is something I know for sure I want. Being able to watch YouTube videos on my TV with my whole family, instead of huddling around a small computer screen, is really nice.

On the other hand, I can’t believe how fast the time flies and how fast the technology evolves and morphs these days. One year ago I was in Berlin talking with journalists for the first time about Digital Home, where the TV sets can handle both the web and regular TV shows.

Here you can see a video with Google TV running Flash content: